Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies: Longlisted for the Booker Prize

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She could feel it; the new chill in the air, the slowing of the clouds, the dizzying shift of atmosphere when tragedy drops into an ordinary day like this. Sometimes it seems to attack the body and sometimes to be the body; sometimes it channels fear and sometimes it is the cause of fear. He had this gentle, scrappy energy and a way of smiling that was like watching a parachute open, and though he believed himself to be a man of middling talent, rarely the main event, but the sort of person that got you there and back safely, he was quietly remarkable, and the best sort of partner Lia could have ever hoped for. In turn, Lia’s mother, Anne, comes to terms not only with her daughter’s illness but her own shortcomings, finding that hospitals are “ideal environments for Mothers Making Amends”.

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies sets its own terms, however strange and conflicted those terms may be. Sadness is not allowed to crowd out wit and joy, and Mortimer asks readers to think about death as something that 'does not happen in the first or third person, but in the second.

The shape of the moment felt like an exact summation of what being a child was; sitting on the top stair of a house trying to look out at the world with two cork-stopper parents blocking the way. Who or what is narrating the first page of Maddie Mortimer’s debut novel, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, isn’t immediately clear.

Confined to its own short chapters early on, its signature bold type begins to infiltrate the standard third-person narration. We’ll fight this, Harry said suddenly, sounding quite unlike himself, we’ve done it before and we’ll do it again. And Markus Zusak went all in when he decided to have the grim reaper himself narrate The Book Thief (2005). In turn, each of these take up their place in the battle raging within Lia’s body, at the centre of which dances the murderous narrator and a boy nicknamed ‘Red’ - the toxic chemo that is Lia’s last hope.The sensation of something buried very deep had gone charging up through her lining, and she had found herself churning out the contents of her stomach over his large nimble fingers, between her own small toes. Dribble had started to leak from the corner of Anne’s lip, beginning a glistening journey down the hard line on her chin. Images are often both pleasing and convoluted, as when Iris considers growing up as a process of moving across from the world of her mother to the world of school in “a terrible act of osmosis”. She examined her skin, her smell, the familiar taste at the back of her throat, the gentle clutch of cold on her shoulders, soaking in the exquisite sensation of normalcy; You won’t feel this for a while. The voice set in bold type concludes the extended analogy by saying it is “a common misconception that creation and discovery don’t require / rather a lot of destruction”.

Maddie Mortimer was born in London in 1996 and received her BA in English Literature from the University of Bristol. Supported by the Arts Council England, this element of the Early Career Awards aims to widen the impact of literary prize culture.Harry took a breath and pushed his keys into the lock, wondering when the foxes had grown so confident, and which of the three cheap rich fluffy puddings he had picked would end up being the right one. A man with matte skin made a break for it, which prompted the girl in the blue school uniform to dart out into the road too, pulling her friend behind her. Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies marks Maddie Mortimer as a major new literary voice, and I Iook forward to seeing her career flourish. Booked the two thirty slot tomorrow, there’s some leftover casserole in the fridge you can microwave. In a remarkable moment of dramatic irony, we find out the cancer is in Lia’s brain before she’s told ‘ It’s in your brain.

Harry was delivering a lecture on Ancient Greek Water Deities but was thinking about the freckles on Lia’s body. Maddie Mortimer’s Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, a bracing debut, ventures into the imagined consciousness of the cancer spreading through one woman’s body, which starts out “no bigger than a capillary, no wiser than a cantaloupe”. An unusual warmth had settled over the day, softening the crisp midsummer edges, and Anne could not stand it. The book — a lyrical exploration of one woman’s body and the illness that inhabits it — was described by judges as a ‘precious and personal’ work from a ‘new and spectacular talent’.Iris spoke animatedly about her day, picking at food in the fridge, the frost of her laugh billowing out into its stark electric light. Outside the house, Harry watched Lia and Iris passing peacefully through the frame of the front window, eyes sore and glassy. Lia watched her half skip through the hallway, the mouth of the house, before disappearing around a corner, down the throat, and felt drenched with the exhaustion of loving someone as much as she did in that moment. For all its rich agility, I am not sure it has quite got the polish to make it on to the Booker shortlist, but who knows.